My rambling thoughts on exploring the .NET framework and related technologies
If you've ever had to write or read a regular expression, you won't need any convincing that a tool to make this easier would be useful!
If you aren't familiar with regexs (as they are colloquially known) then it's worth getting to know, as they can be amazingly useful at times. Sadly, they can also be amazingly difficult to write, and impossible to read afterwards!
Here are a few tips for taking away the pain.
Does this sound familiar...
User: Your app just crashed
You: What happened?
User: It crashed
You: (sigh) What were you doing at the time?
User: Using the app
You: (sigh) What specifically were you doing?
User: I was clicking in that box
You: Which box?
User: You know, the one on the window you get when you click the other button
...and so it goes on
Read how we managed to get useful information about errors without having to suffer speaking to the users!
A hopefully enlightening story.
I had the need to get the latitude and longitude for UK postcodes. Knowing that another developer had recently done a lot of work doing similar things using the Google Maps API, I had a look at the code she had written. Following the Google guidelines, she had ended up adding wads of C# classes, defining the various data types that the API returns, as well as a lot of helper methods to parse the data. I had that horrible sinking feeling you get when you can see a small design requirement blow up out of all proportion.
Whilst contemplating the problem, I had an epiphany, and realised that I could solve the problem in a much simpler way, albeit with some initial effort. I thought the technique might be useful to others, but more significantly, thought that the idea of thinking outside of the box may be of interest.
Forget all you ever learnt about enterprise design, I'll reveal the truth, and it's not pleasant (but quite funny!)